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Why do software developers get paid so much yet work so slowly? The global software market is $500 billion and growing by about 5% per year. But there are only 18 million software developers worldwide and universities cannot mint computer science grads fast enough. That’s why software costs and developer salaries march inexorably higher.

The starting salary for a highly qualified developer in Seattle is about $150,000. Tech companies are super interested in how to squeeze more productivity from what’s probably their most expensive worker class. How do you get teams of people who are paid so much to work even faster?

DevOps (Developer Operations) addresses this economic squeeze. The primary component of DevOps is continuous integration. Continuous integration is a development practice that requires developers to integrate code into a shared repository several times a day. Each check-in is then verified by an automated build, allowing teams to detect problems early. This is a massive time and cost saver.

DevOps is a cultural, technical and process-oriented change that helps companies build better software faster. In addition to the cost of software development, DevOps also addresses quality, speed and innovation. These are powerful because we’re talking about a $500 billion industry chasing trillion dollar opportunities where any improvement could be a jackpot.

Software quality is improved in two ways. Automation reduces human error. Software updates, including bug fixes, can be implemented and shared out with customers in hours or minutes rather than weeks.

Speed benefits everyone. Development cycles are compressed from months to days or hours. This pleases customers and comptrollers.

Innovation happens when developers have more time. Traditional developers spend their days fixing bad code on legacy applications. This is no fun. t prevents them from creating something new. Organizations that implement DevOps release more new features that generate new revenue.

The DevOps tools market is growing by 18% and will reach $8.8 billion in 2023. Chef, Heptio, and Microsoft Visual Studio are Seattle companies benefiting from the growth. CloudBees, SolarWinds, Kubernetes (Google), Docker and Vagrant are major vendors in the category.

But mostly DevOps is about people. In this case freeing the 18 million developers to write better code faster and getting their Saturdays back.